There is an Illinois lawyer who routinely insults other attorneys with words like “fool” and “idiot” and “punk”–once telling a lawyer, “I will be teaching you a lesson in civility, understand, boy?”
Unfortunately, this lawyer is not unique, jurists say.
Law journals are filled with anecdotes of lawyers whose behavior toward the courts or other lawyers ranges from the obnoxious to the felonious. The problem is often described as the decline of civility in the legal profession.
Consider some recent examples:
– “You could gag a maggot off a meat wagon,” an attorney in a Delaware lawsuit told the opposing lawyer.
– In Michigan, a 63-year-old lawyer punched another lawyer in the face during court proceedings.
– Earlier this month, a prosecutor with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office referred to a criminal defendant’s seven children as “bastards” during the man’s sentencing.
The incivility is occurring against a backdrop of dramatic changes in the legal profession. Blue-blood law firms that once guaranteed partners a position for life now push out older lawyers who aren’t generating enough business for the firm.
Headhunters hired by law firms routinely raid other firms of their best lawyers, another phenomenon unknown in the past. And competition for clients and revenue has reached a new intensity, with law firms demanding their lawyers work unendurably long hours.
Chief Judge Marvin Aspen of U.S. District Court has for years worried about the loss of civility in the legal profession. A decade ago he formed a committee of lawyers and judges to devise standards of behavior, which were eventually adopted by the American Bar Association and many courts.
“Law firms today are run more as a business than a profession–bottom-line results are most important,” he said. With the emphasis on money, courtesy suffers.
Aspen, by the way, has little first-hand experience with incivility in his courtroom. There are few lawyers so self-destructive as to act up in court.
Often the incidents occur during deposition–the questioning of witnesses before trial–because no judge is present to keep order.
Incivility need not be dramatic.
A lawyer can schedule questioning of a witness to inconvenience opposing counsel. Or he can delay producing documents.
But some behavior is so extreme it invites punishment.
That role falls to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois. The commission disciplines lawyers who violate ethical canons, commit crimes or engage in other wrongdoing.
James Grogan, chief counsel for the commission, said disciplinary action is pending against the lawyer who calls colleagues “fool” and “idiot.” He said the commission is seeing an increasing number of cases involving gross incivility.
“Fifteen years ago practitioners started saying they were seeing people be vicious rather than professional,” Grogan said. “In the 1990s we started seeing an increase in these cases of disruptive behavior.”
Grogan says the lack of civility can start with harsh words and end in violence. An Illinois lawyer threatened two other lawyers during a deposition, Grogan said. Then he drove his tractor into their client’s car and shoved it 200 feet.
“Then there is this guy,” Grogan said. This guy is an Illinois lawyer who cursed a court clerk, refused to obey a judge’s instructions, began shouting in the courtroom, then repeatedly struck a sheriff’s deputy with his fists, Grogan said.
Many factors are working to diminish civility within the law. Lawyers are under tremendous pressure to produce victories for their clients and revenue for their firm. The consequences of defeat –from loss of money to loss of freedom–are severe.
“Workloads have just gone through the roof,” said Robert Whitfield of Robert Whitfield Associates, a Chicago-based headhunter hired by law firms to recruit talented lawyers from other firms.
Whitfield said that 20 years ago, a law firm might expect a lawyer to generate 1,600 billable hours a year. Now the number is closer to 2,400 hours, with outstanding performers hitting 3,500 hours.
“Everybody is terribly overworked,” Whitfield said.
Nor can lawyers count on keeping a client they have served faithfully. Whitfield said that in the past, law firms never competed for clients. And clients rarely switched from one firm to another. The relationship of client and law firm was almost hereditary, with one firm serving one client for generations.
“It was considered absolutely unacceptable to compete for clients openly,” Whitfield said.
Such a quaint arrangement is long gone, and law firms now must hawk themselves to attract lucrative clients.
“The clients have beauty contests,” Whitfield said. “They invite law firms to bid for them. The law firms show up and make presentations, and the client selects one.”
Whitfield describes such contests as “brutal.”
Increasing the tension within law firms is the fear that lawyers will depart for the competition–and fear on the part of lawyers that they will be shoved aside if they fall from favor.
At one time law firms would not try to poach one another’s lawyers, Whitfield said, nor would they push out their own lawyers for financial reasons. “This was unheard of in the legal profession,” Whitfield said. “The competition among firms [for good lawyers] has heated up enormously. And when firms lose clients, they get rid of lawyers. They didn’t used to do that.”
Sidley & Austin, a Chicago-based law firm with a national reputation for top-quality work, recently took personnel actions that would have been unthinkable in the past.
Last fall Sidley & Austin demoted more than 30 partners in their mid-50s to early 60s. The firm said at the time that no one was asked to retire or quit, but clearly the lawyers had lost status.
No one from Sidley & Austin could be reached for comment Friday.
But last year Thomas Cole, chairman of Sidley’s executive committee, explained to Chicago Lawyer magazine why the firm had acted as it had. “We are reacting to an increasingly competitive environment,” Cole said.
In September Sidley & Austin issued a press release that said it had hired four lawyers from a competing firm, Katten Muchin Zavis.
“Our four new partners are wonderfully talented lawyers,” Charles Douglas, chairman of Sidley & Austin’s management committee, said in the release. “Their practice is a terrific strategic fit for the firm and our growth plans.”
Katten Muchin Zavis had its own announcement this month: It had hired a lawyer away from Welsh & Katz.
The rising tension and pressure in the legal profession is taking a psychological toll, legal observers say, and that promotes incivility.
“Lawyers are in a bad way these days in terms of dissatisfaction and depression,” said Steven Keeva, an Evanston-based legal journalist who writes for the American Bar Association Journal.
A 1991 study by Johns Hopkins University ranked lawyers as the professionals most likely to suffer depression.
That same year a study by the North Carolina Bar Association reported that almost 26 percent of its membership exhibited signs of clinical depression, far higher than the population as a whole.
Moreover, the incivility of some lawyers breeds additional incivility, Keeva said. “The more it gets to be OK to treat people badly in the legal profession, the easier it is to keep doing it,” he said.
“I have talked with women lawyers who say they have had to get meaner to be accepted by the guys in the firm,” he said.
Things have gone so far, in fact, that some lawyers’ antics are giving the law a bad name.
“The perception of a lack of civility of lawyers toward one another leading to win-at-any cost tactics and hardball ultimatums have reduced the public’s esteem of lawyers,” the American Board of Trial Advocates said in September.
Reece Williams, president of the organization, said some clients demand hostile words and deeds from their lawyers.
“If the client begins to let you know that you are not sufficiently aggressive, then of course the onus is on you to start acting more fierce,” Williams said.
The client is a loser as a result, Williams said.
A belligerent lawyer invites retaliation from opposing counsel. Boorish behavior alienates judges and juries. Obstructive tactics make it hard to settle cases out of court, costing clients money
“There are some lawyers,” Williams said, “who have made careers out of making their clients think they are the meanest lawyer in town.
“How mean a lawyer is,” Williams hastens to add, “has nothing to do with the results in court.”
